Andrew Osborn

Andrew Osborn is the Daily Telegraph's Moscow correspondent. He has lived in Russia since 2004 and covered the Beslan school siege, the 2008 Russia-Georgia war, and has reported widely from across the former Soviet Union. His personal website is andrewosborn.co.uk.

Nobody has yet claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing of Moscow’s busy Domodedovo airport on Monday, a cowardly attack that left thirty-five people dead and dozens more injured. Nor have Russian investigators named any suspects.

But it would be astonishing if the origins of the attack did not lie some 1,000 miles south of Moscow in Russia’s predominantly Muslim North Caucasus area. This area includes not just the Chechnya of terrifying popular imagination, but a patchwork of small mostly Muslim internal Russian republics such as Dagestan and Ingushetia where the rule of law is tested by bombs and bullets almost every day.

The region fell out of fashion with the Western media in the early part of the last… Read More

The 1997 James Bond film “Tomorrow Never Dies” opens with a scene from a terrorist arms bazaar “on the Russian border.” We see potential buyers eyeing up Scud missiles, attack helicopters, heavy machine guns, and armoured vehicles. Or as one of Bond’s colleagues back at MI6 headquarters in London darkly quips: “(There is) fun for the whole family.” The Bond films are of course fictional, but the colourful scene was evocative of a place that is all too real and not that far away: Belarus.

Sandwiched between Russia and the European Union and run for the last sixteen years by the neo-Soviet leader, Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus is a thriving marketplace for shadowy arms sales. If its critics are right, it… Read More

Banksy has announced that he will give the proceeds of an auction of his prints today to a radical Russian art collective called "Voina" or "War".

Though £80,000 is probably not a lot of money for the secretive and by now extremely wealthy graffiti artist, it still rates as a very generous gesture.

It is one that will be welcomed by Voina itself, two of whose members are languishing in jail on hooliganism charges. The two men complain that they have been badly mistreated by the police.

Yet in donating some of his cash, and by association sharing some of his stardust with Voina, Banksy’s admirers are likely to be left even more puzzled about his tastes, his beliefs, and possibly even his judgment than they already… Read More

For most countries, hosting the World Cup is about sport, money and prestige. For Russia, which has just won the right to hold the Fifa tournament in 2018, geopolitics is just as important. Just like the Soviet Union before it, Moscow sees such events as a chance to showcase the Kremlin’s growing clout on the world stage. As Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, prepares to fly to Zurich to bask in the limelight, he will allow himself a wry smile.

He very publicly staked his own reputation on Russia beating England to the prize and his gamble paid off. To be fair, Mr Putin did go the extra mile. He interrupted his holiday this summer to meet a visiting Fifa delegation and gave… Read More

Vladimir Putin won't be shaken by news that a US diplomat believes he knew about the operation to murder Alexander Litvinenko in London before it happened.

The claim, made in one of the US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, merely echoes an allegation that has been made on and off with much greater force by the late Mr Litvinenko’s friends and widow for the last four years. In fact, for them it does not go far enough. They believe that Mr Putin not only knew about the murder plot but sanctioned it and sent a hit squad to eliminate Mr Litvinenko who had long been considered a traitor by elements in Russia’s security services.

Protests against Vladimir Putin, Russia’s all-powerful prime minister, are rare. But last Saturday the Kremlin allowed hundreds of people to gather in central Moscow to chant “Down with Putin” for two hours until they were blue in the face.

Special Forces are seen in front of the Chechen parliament complex (Photo: AP)

Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, has been struck by Islamist terrorists in a brazen suicide attack. The assault has punctured the Kremlin’s far-fetched claims that the restive region is “safe and stable”. Three extremists drove into the internal Russian republic’s parliamentary compound on Tuesday morning, killed three people, and then blew themselves up with explosives. Witnesses said the trio shouted “Allahu Akhbar”, and engaged in a fierce gun battle with Special Forces.

The parliament building was left badly scarred and seventeen people seriously wounded. If that is what Russia’s interior minister Rashid Nurgaliyev calls stability (a statement he made hours after the attack) then I think someone needs to hand the man a dictionary. Chechnya i… Read More

Puppet or master of his own fate and the world’s largest country? That is the question that has bedevilled Russian President Dmitry Medvedev since he moved into the Kremlin in 2008. As a crunch presidential election in 2012 gets closer and speculation mounts as to who will be the establishment candidate (and therefore guaranteed to win by a landslide), it is a question that is being asked with growing urgency.

Gifted the job by the outgoing president Vladimir Putin, Mr Medvedev, an affable former corporate lawyer, has not yet stepped out of his powerful patron’s shadow. In fact, at times, he has appeared to play up to the humiliating moniker, imitating the way that Mr Putin talks, walks and dresses. Few, including the Russian public, doubt… Read More

The expedition to plant a Russian flag on the seabed at the North Pole, 2007 (Photo: Reuters)

It is fashionable to talk up the Arctic as some sort of treasure trove of oil and gas and as the gateway to a promising new ice-free sea route. Time, global warming, and new technology may well prove the optimists right. But for Russia, just like the Soviet Union before it, the region is equally important as a Cold War-style arena to demonstrate the country's new geopolitical ambitions.

That frontier spirit is embodied in one man: Artur Chilingarov. Bearded, cheerful, and a well-loved Hero of Russia, the 71-year-old professional polar explorer is the public face of the Kremlin’s designs on the Arctic. He was the man who dove… Read More

At first glance, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Vladimir Putin don't seem to have much in common. The former spent much of his life in a wheelchair, while the Russian prime minister revels in displays of full-bodied vitality. But Mr Putin’s advisers and, it now seems, the man himself, believe that he is “the Russian Roosevelt”. It would be a curious analogy if it was not one that cast such a long shadow over Russia’s political future.

For the FDR comparison has been carefully selected. With four consecutive terms under his belt, President Roosevelt was the longest-serving president in US history. He was also the man who led the United States out of the Great Depression and through the Second World War…. Read More